INTERVIEW XI PART II “Pushing The Limits of Successful Design”

Vint Cerf

VP, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google

Co-Designer of TCP/IP Protocols

Technology Policy Developer

[Recorded February 4, 2025, via Google Meet]

“Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." – Lily Tomlin

[CONTINUED FROM PART I]

We were previously speaking about the challenges facing young people with face-to-face communication in an increasingly digital world that has the potential to cause isolation or detached socialization rather than real connection.

In his demonstration, he abruptly stops speaking while maintaining eye contact to see how long we can carry on without the need for one of us to break the awkward silence.

VINT:

“You don't know what to do in that situation, and hanging up is even more awkward because you can't see the person. With texting, perhaps they got distracted, and you have no idea what happened. Maybe they had to go to the John, or whatever the situation was, so you're forgiven. It's an easy out, but most discourse in human interaction is anything but that. It's often face-to-face.

Email and texting have similar characteristics, although I'll tell you a secret about email. I'm still a big email addict. I use it all the time, mostly on the Google Mail app. I learned a couple of lessons, one of them being that you always process your email in reverse order of receipt, and there are two values from that.

The first is that if you start with the most recent, your response will be astonishing to the person that sent the email because often it will have been within minutes of their having sent it, so they come away impressed by the fact that you're highly responsive. However, this means other people don't get the same response.

This differentiation is important because if there's been some hoo-ha since the last time you looked at your inbox and you haven’t read the older emails, it might have been resolved.

If you start with the oldest message and work your way up, you may not have to intervene at all.

Working backward is smart and prevents accidentally reigniting something or trying to solve a problem that's already been solved. Reverse processing your emails is an important trick.”

INTERVIEWER:

“That’s something I haven’t thought about, and I will start utilizing that practice from now on because, in my experience, what you mentioned is true. When you’re busy and in contact with people from multiple sources, the oldest email usually has been solved already, and then we've all wasted our time, and that’s not a good look.” 

VINT:

“Exactly, and there is a side effect, which is that people may have gotten the impression that you're always on and you're instantaneous about your response.

If you don't respond, they call to see if you're sick or something because they're not accustomed to a delayed response. I have had people call when I might have been busy and had meetings all day not looking at my emails, and they got nervous because they didn't hear from me.”

INTERVIEWER:

“Returning to what we spoke of earlier on the human side of connection to technology, do you foresee an adoption of healthy use of tech by those of us that still value human connection as we continue to advance?

I believe that technology is inherently good. It's meant to make our lives easier.

AI has a lot of applications to make our lives easier, and I don't think so much about a Doomsday scenario that often gets spoken about, but how do we keep our humanity alive?”

VINT:

“That’s a good question. First of all, there are certain things that we all share, regardless of individual factors.

You could be a thief and a villain, but you and I both share the need to breathe, eat, and sleep. We've got a certain amount of physical reality that is a shared experience.

We might live in a similar part of the world or enjoy a certain standard of living, although many people don't.

The online world has allowed people to discover others who live in very different circumstances, cultures, educational experiences, and socioeconomic levels.

That's a good thing, and getting exposed to differences is important. It used to be that the only way to do that was to travel. Today, there are other avenues for experiencing human variety.

Sharing a meal in person is an important practice, and it's quite different from doing a video call or having a telephone conversation. Back in the day, telephones were the only means of a real, remote interaction, short of writing letters, which was a very slow process. When I was a teenager, talking on the phone for hours was a normal way of building friendships and the only social alternative to doing things in person.

During the COVID period, we held a lot of video calls like what we’re doing now because we couldn't be physically co-located. I remember the moment when we finally decided it was okay to get back together again, and it was like discovering that there was a third dimension—that it was okay to get up and walk around during a meeting…”

[Vint stands and walks out of the frame, continuing to speak.]

”…if I do that now, just get up and walk around, you might be able to hear me, but it's a little weird because there's this empty room. On the other hand, if we were in the same room together, you'd see me get up and walk around, and you could cross-track me.

I suppose if we had a camera that was tracking me, it might be a little bit better, but for the most part, we're forced to sit here in front of the camera because the camera isn't following us. It's a very artificial kind of interaction, although I still find this sort of discussion is reinforcing if it the only option or until the time comes where you can get together in person.

The other thing I like about working with someone else in person is that you can stand in front of a whiteboard and have a heated debate, then go out and have a beer together and find common ground. I like working with people, co-located, with a whiteboard, sketching what it is that you’re trying to figure out and seeking to understand what the other person is doing and thinking. Personal collaborations are important to me.

The real question, again, is The Machine Stops story—very worthy of your attention. 

We, as a society, are constantly experiencing the effects of new technology.

For travel, it used to be that if you were going anywhere that was more than an hour away, it was a big deal—pack a lunch, bring saddle bags and provisions. We had horseback, carriages, and boats—boats in some form have been around for a very long time, but think about steamships, which came about later on.

Then we got other forms of transportation: trains, automobiles and motorized vehicles, and then suddenly we had airplanes that ran faster than the horse could.

Our scope for casual interaction increased dramatically.

If you're in the Los Angeles area, it's no big deal to drive an hour; it's so spread out. Where I am in Northern Virginia, 30-45 minutes is the comfortable norm.

We keep experiencing new technologies that accelerate convenience and adopt them just as we've adopted mobile phones and apps. It's just that when you become dependent on them and they don’t work, then it becomes very inconvenient. So you should be worried about the fragility and brittleness of the society we're living in right now. It really is quite brittle, especially because everything is mostly software. Some of the interactions on the net have never happened before in the history of the universe, and the software wasn't necessarily designed to interact with each other.

Every time you open a new web page, your computer and the destination server are in a different joint state than they were ever in before. You’re pushing the limits of successful design because you're confronting those devices with an interaction you never tested for and maybe could never have anticipated, which is why stuff breaks all the time in the software world.

I worry a lot about not having enough backup, not performing adequate system analysis to look for dependencies and single points of failure, not looking carefully enough at testing how to recover data—or see if we even can.

It feels to me like we should be paying a lot more attention to it than we have been. We will regret it when things don't work, and we didn't anticipate the possibility of failure, which means we fundamentally don't know how to perform successful recovery. That will turn out to be potentially damaging.”

INTERVIEWER:

“Is that something that you are working on currently?”

VINT:

“As the Chief Internet Evangelist, I do sermons on this topic all the time. There are things that I'm working on, like the digital vellum idea, as a way of preserving tech and digital content over hundreds of years. I've been preaching about system architecture, looking at things as complex systems that are interacting and analyzing for mutual dependencies, thinking your way through backup, because the more complicated we make our society, the harder it's going to be to keep it functional.

When something breaks, it could be catastrophic. Hopefully, that's when the human resolve can take over to fix it.”

INTERVIEWER:

“One of my favorite things that I heard on an interview you gave was related to the best way we can solve those problems, to differentiate good information from bad information, was to use a process called ‘What, Where’?”

VINT:

“Yes, critical thinking is, ‘What, Where.’ On that topic, I've been speaking about the idea of the Internet driver's license, where you don't get to go online until you've demonstrated that you understand the hazards of being online and how to behave in a safe and protected way.

Just like we teach safe driving, to assume the other guys on the road are crazy, to demonstrate an understanding of responsibility, before we give you a license and toss you the keys.

Although I don't think you literally have to get an internet license, I do think we should be crafting more education for young people around some of these ideas so that they can understand and appreciate how things might go wrong.

When I'm talking to my engineers during the design process, I ask them: What could go wrong, and what can we do about it? 

That is something not often done, the focus is mostly based on how to get it to work at all.

When you put something together, in the theory of everything, all things being equal, it will work.

That’s what we thought with the first design of TCP. We discovered immediately upon implementation that there were flaws, so we went to the second version, the third version, and the fourth version. We had to get real-world experience to expose the flaws.”

INTERVIEWER:

”The concept of generativity is very important and interesting to me.

Are there concepts and ideas you desire to give the next generation? What would you like your legacy to be?”

VINT:

“Certainly the importance of curiosity. We should want to know how stuff works and why it works that way, why it could work any other way—that's applicable to everything. There's a book on my bookshelf, which is…

[Vint points to a book behind him on his bookshelf]. 

…there, that blue-covered book, 1,400 pages long, and it's called Molecular Biology of the Cell. That's the sixth edition; the seventh edition is just coming out.

I bring this up because I used to have a naïve sense that a cell was a just little bag full of chemicals that bumped into each other, and stuff just happened. The author of the book, Bruce Alberts, who is the former head of the National Academy of Sciences, told me I had to read it and to make sure I got the latest edition.

So I did, and I've been mesmerized. I got to the section on cell reproduction, and there is an unbelievable process for replicating the DNA in the cell.

The process is so complex, and it has a bunch of places where stuff can go wrong and steps that it takes in order to notice that something has gone wrong and fix it. How the hell this can evolve over a period of 3 billion years is beyond me.

The cell is about as complicated as downtown Manhattan when you look at it.

I have been utterly fascinated by how complex cells are and how amazingly well they’ve worked. The error rate in DNA reproduction is on the order of three times ten to the minus nine, which is just amazing.

[Denoted scientifically as (10^-9) as an error rate of 1 in 10 billion.] 

You would give blood for your optical fiber network to have that kind of reliability. 

So, there are all kinds of places in the process of cell division when the genetic material is reproduced, with all kinds of checks and tests to make sure that the copy is accurate. It’s fascinating, and part of the reason I got this book is because I was curious about cancer, because cancer is unrestricted cell reproduction. Normally, there is a mechanism that causes cells to stop reproducing because the DNA copying starts to fail.

There are some specific reasons for that. Despite the fact that it's a highly accurate process, there is one element of the process of normal cell reproduction that causes a replication beyond about 45 or 50 times to become unreliable.

The cells can figure out when it's gotten to that point, and it ostensibly commits suicide, called cell apoptosis. Cancer cells don't detect that they have reached this point; they just keep reproducing and become a real nuisance.

There's another situation where a cell becomes senescent, which means that it has stopped reproducing, but it's still cranking out toxins like grumpy old cells.

I actually wrote an essay entitled, ‘Grumpy Old Cells’ describing this whole process.

I sent a copy of my little essay to Bruce Alberts, thinking I'd better get somebody to tell me if I said anything really stupid.

He said that I basically captured one of the problems of senescent cells, and I was happy and relieved to hear that.

It's just fascinating. So, this is just a manifestation of curiosity—how do things work? Why does it work that way? And most importantly, what happens when it goes wrong?”

END OF PART 2

INTERMISSION

Recorded, Written, and Edited by Cameron Thompson for Third Chapter Curious, LLC, 2025